Friday, December 19, 2008

Readerville's Blog of the Week

Before the proliferation of blogs dedicated to the appreciation of cover design today, readerville.com was the only site on the web where you could read any discussions focusing on the cover design instead of the content. The Most Coveted Covers features were a must read and the follow up comments that began with admiration but quickly degraded to negativity was even more fun to read. Even though it sometimes annoyed the sh*t out of me.

The web is full of beautiful websites by book cover designers showcasing their work, but they are strictly that—portfolios of finished work. Henry Sene Yee (whose work, I should note, often appears in Most Coveted Covers) has taken a very different approach....

2 comments:

Congratulations for making Readerville's Blog of the Week. I would agree with Karen that the journey you take on each cover is what interests us the most. Thanks for taking us along for a little bit of the ride.

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A HOW Magazine Top 10 Sites for Designers

My InstaGram Slideshow

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Henry Sene Yee is...

the Creative Director of PICADOR.

A BFA graduate of the School of Visual Arts in NYC, he started his career in editorial design freelancing at Condé Nast, and Rolling Stone magazine with Art Director Fred Woodward. He got his first job in book publishing working as a Junior Designer for Louise Fili, the Art Director at Pantheon Books / Random House. He left to work for St. Martin's Press as a Senior Designer, eventually promoted to Senior Art Director Deluxe and to his current position as Creative Director of Picador, a leading literary trade paperback imprint launched in 1995.

He has won numerous awards including: AIGA's 50 Books/50 Covers, The Art Directors Club GOLD Cube Winner, The Type Directors Club, The New York Book Show, The Society of Illustrators, Print Magazine's Regional Design Annual, Communication Arts, Graphis magazine, and EYE magazine's JUST ADD STOCK Winner. His design and photography blogs were chosen as a HOW magazine Top Ten Site for Designers.

He is a frequent guest speaker, lecturer, and competition judge as well as an instructor at the School of Visual Arts, NYC.

He can always be seen with a camera in one hand and a martini in the other.

MY INSPIRATION PINBOARDS:

How do you design a book cover?

First you start with a blank page, stare and think really hard, drink lots of coffee, take lots of breaks, fix the copier jam, update your Facebook page, get over the fears that this project is the one that will finally expose you as the hack that you are, and then just trust to do what you feel is right from what you've read, present your ideas to find out how they live outside of your head, listen to feedback, try to leave work at a decent hour, have a life, floss, get enough sleep, have a good breakfast and come back the next day to redo it all over again. It's that simple and fun. And if it isn't, then get another blank page and start all over again.